Books: Oboe Jungle


"Look, this organization belongs to the Main Line because that kind of person started it and that kind of person has kept it alive. If you let every Tom, Dick and Harry on the board this institution will go down the drain."

"We don’t need Negroes, educators or musicians on the Board," observed another, "because they don’t swing any financial weight. We need people who can pull in big money."

Anyone who has stood in line for hours for tickets to the Robin Hood Dell could shatter this logic, though. For years, Freddy Mann kept the Dell alive, pulling in large amounts of financial support from resources the Orchestra plainly refused to tap: well-to-do Jewish businessmen and the music-lovers themselves who were willing to pay whatever they had to if they could hem modern music.
Basically, Arian notes, at the heart of the resistance among Main Liners was what they considered "good music."

"I ‘ll resign before I permit you fellows to playa bunch of junk all over town," stormed one director. "We’d have to be pretty desperate before we’d stoop to making a circus out of this institution."

Rather than stoop to the level of the public, the Orchestra has consistently preferred to make itself unavailable to them. Refusing to play Convention Hall, choosing to spcn~1 its summers touring the concert halls of Europe, Japan, South America and Saratoga, it has built its financial base on flight, Arian indicates.

As he tells it, the mainstay of the orchestra is record making. For years it has dominated the classical record market, nourishing its reputation and revenues by visiting concert halls where listeners might be induced to go out and buy an album or two or more. Un less concertgoers get to see the orchestra in person about once in five years, record sales-estimated at between a quarter and half of total revenues — slip.

How this works out for the hometown crowd proves fascinating. Arian claims that local subscription concerts. because of the limited outlay for rehearsals, serve as dress rehearsals for weekly recording sessions. As a result, what Philadelphians hear at the Academy is really a warm-up for the world’s armchair audience.

The cycle is neatly self-perpetuating: the traditional music Ormandy serves up at Broad and Locust nourishes not only the tastes of conservative Philadelphians, but feeds the tape machines at recording sessions at the Philadelphia Athletic Club ballroom for export worldwide. So what the world has come to know as the Philadelphia Sound cannot be tampered with without jeopardizing the survival of the entire institution.

How this all works out for the musicians themselves was, until the cataclysmic strike of ’66, predictable enough. Records, not music makers, were what mattered. It was cheaper to find another horn player than add to the cost of making records. If a troublemaker couldn’t be appeased, he could be replaced.
But what Arian and his union agitators finally began to get across to Ormandy and the Main Line was that, without musicians, there would be no music, no orchestra, no institution.

Ironically. as Arian points out, once the board — in the person of arch-blueblood president C. Wanton Balis — grasped this fact, all hell broke loose.
"What Balis said to us was in effect, ‘All right. boys. what do you want?’ Our answer, basically, was job security. a 52-week schedule~; Getting it proved to be our undoing.

So thoroughgoing had the alienation of at least a third of the 107-member ensemble become by this point that, even when Balis and the board gave in, the dissidents immediately began shouting that they were being overworked.

The denouement was inexorable: Too many new cars and new homes prevented the orchestra members from going back now, the ultimate trap of bureaucracy-job security-had been sprung, the battle lines were formed.